Food Forests and Home Gardens: Their Roles and Functions in Domestic Food Production and Food Security in the Caribbean

Abstract

In the Caribbean, kitchen gardens can be categorized into home gardens and food forests. Home gardens are typically small cultivated areas in the backyard, where vegetables, pepper, sweet potato, pumpkin, callaloo (spinach), a few ears of corn, and other short-term crops are grown; the produce is strictly for home consumption and for sharing with relatives and friends. Food forests are also grown on the home plot. They are low-maintenance and low-input agroforestry systems, characterized by a wide diversity of plant species—predominantly fruit and food trees such as mango; various species of citrus, mainly orange, grapefruit, and tangerine; ackee; breadfruit; avocado; jackfruit; coconut; plantain; and banana—and also nonfood perennial hardwoods such as cedar, mahoe, and mahagony, which are commercially lucrative lumber trees—are grown. Other woody perennials are grown for their ecological benefits to the system. Food forests also have an undergrowth of plants such as medicinal herbs and bushes and food crops such as coco yams, dasheen, sugarcane, and yam. These agrospaces mimic a forest in terms of the vertical configuration of plants of different heights, hence the terminology “food forests.” The literature on Caribbean agriculture sometimes refers to these food forests simply as kitchen gardens (see Brierley, 1991, 1976, 1974; Hills, 1988; Thomasson, 1994), but we urge readers to use this description carefully, because to the average Jamaican, for example, a kitchen garden might simply refer to the backyard vegetable plot.